The easement around Woodward Academy telegraphs the news of the charter school’s closure, loud and clear: Signs aimed at enticing Woodward Academy students to other districts, to other charter schools, and a bright orange sign advertising a liquidation auction. Woodward Academy shut its doors in June. After 21 years in operation, its authorization was revoked by Central Michigan University, under whose aegis it had operated — news that broke in April, near the end of the school year, leaving 520 children and the parents who love them to scramble, searching for hope in a city where good schools are too few, and where the information that should make selecting a school easy is buried in a nearly impenetrable mass of data.

Any time a school closes, there’s a hole in the neighborhood — a hulking building, headed for blight. The dollars that followed those children, siphoned from the state budget that supports traditional public schools, are in limbo. Much like those parents and students, who must start the painful process of finding a school in Detroit, again.

Welcome to school choice, as it's played out in Detroit.

Charter schools should be held accountable, and poor performing charter schools should be closed. But when they don't fulfill that promise of innovative achievement that outperforms under-resourced traditional public schools, it's a blow to the community. And to the parents who put their faith in charter schools.

“I’m not anti-choice,” says Maria Montoya, former director of education advocacy nonprofit Enroll Detroit, “But we created a world in which information is not always there, and what is there doesn’t make sense.”

For Detroit parents, finding a good school isn’t easy. By the numbers — test scores, expenditure per pupil, class sizes, teacher pay, classroom resources — suburban schools outperform city schools. That’s why so many Detroit students have decamped for the suburbs, drawn by the allure of safer, better schools.

In most suburban communities, it isn’t this hard — your child attends school at the geographically logical neighborhood school. In Detroit, parents pick from an overwhelming array of options — magnet schools, single-gender schools, application schools — each with its own requirements. Public schools, at least, are a one-stop shop. For charter schools, it’s piecemeal.

And for parents struggling to do the right thing, all of this obfuscation makes it hard to know what the right thing is.

Woodward Academy, one of three charter schools that announced it would close last school year, saw years of declining test scores. Only 2.8% of its students in grades three through eight tested proficient in math and English in the current year, according to the website MiSchoolData.org, home to all kinds of information about the school’s academic outcomes, its financial outlook and its statewide ranking (Woodward Academy is orange, which is Not Good).

But Montoya says that kind of information only reaches a small percentage of parents.

“We feel strongly that this set of parents coming out of this set of school closures loved their schools, were happy with educators, transportation was functioning for them, and they had a school that felt like a community,” she says. “Parents knew they were in trouble, knew it was on the priority list, knew it had many red flags, but at the end of the day really trusted and bonded with school leaders, and they had really created an environment where the students felt safe.”

And for parents forced to balance accessibility, safety and practicality with academic outcomes — and with those outcomes frequently opaque — test scores may not be the most important thing.

"Customer service, is there safety and security, how the outside looks," Montoya ticks off items that can influence a decision. "But once we get into our building and are interacting with teachers and staff, how do you interact with me? ... As much as we have bus ads and radio ads calling for students to attend (charters or other school districts), you have to answer the phone and call people back. Parents whose schools have closed are in crisis, if you want them, you have to show you have a place for them."

But most parents start even closer to home.

"Let’s be real, most parents start their search by word of mouth or referral," says Chastity Pratt Dawsey, an education reporter for Bridge Magazine. "There are levels to the game — optics, data and word of mouth."

A school that won't allow a parent to take a tour, or doesn't offer ready information about its resources or programs, or won't allow parents to sit in on a class — all should be red flags, she says.

But all of that may take a back seat to practical concerns, like proximity to a parent's school or work, the presence of a social support network — friends or family with children in the school — can be the deciding factors, and that's the kind of stuff that can't be quantified by reports.

And it's a drill Detroit parents know all too well.

Parents of students at the now-closed Woodward Academy will select new schools, in Detroit Public Schools Community District or in other charters, or other districts. And maybe those schools will stay open, or maybe they'll close at next year's end.

This is the uncertainty that defines parenting in Detroit.

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong title for Maria Montoya. She is the former director of Enroll Detroit.